The Black Cloud

As an immense cloud of gas enters the solar system, it blocks the sun, threatening to wipe out most of life on Earth. In Britain, a team of scientists gathers at a secret location to deal with the crisis. But as the months pass, what they learn will challenge everything they believe about the nature of life and the universe.

The Children of Darkness: The Seekers, Book 1

A thousand years ago the Darkness came - a terrible time of violence, fear, and social collapse when technology ran rampant. But the vicars of the Temple of Light brought peace, ushering in an era of blessed simplicity. For 10 centuries they have kept the madness at bay with "temple magic," and by eliminating forever the rush of progress that nearly caused the destruction of everything. Childhood friends Orah and Nathaniel have always lived in the tiny village of Little Pond, longing for more from life.

Eon

Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but the arrival of the 300-kilometer long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge.

Fluency

NASA discovered the alien ship lurking in the asteroid belt in the 1960's. They kept the Target under intense surveillance for decades, letting the public believe they were exploring the solar system, while they worked feverishly to refine the technology needed to reach it. Dr. Jane Holloway is content documenting nearly-extinct languages and had never contemplated becoming an astronaut. But when NASA recruits her to join a team of military scientists for an expedition to the Target, it's an adventure she can't refuse.

Toward Yesterday

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself 25 years in the past? For the nine billion people living in the year 2042 it's no longer a question...it's a reality. When a seemingly simple experiment goes disastrously wrong, James Baston finds himself stranded in the past alongside the rest of mankind. Here the old are young once more, the dead live again, and civilization is in chaos.

Voyagers

Stoner knew. The fiery object hurtling toward the Earth was an alien spacecraft. But the world might never know. He was trapped in an iron cordon of secrecy, for the discovery had shattered the world power balance, setting off a brutal struggle for supremacy that raged from the sacred halls of the Vatican to the corridors of the Kremlin and the Pentagon. The forces of fear and treachery would use any weapon at their command, from mind war to sabotage, to keep the world in darkness.

A Heritage of Stars

More than a thousand years have passed since humankind intentionally destroyed its treacherous technology, choosing to revert back to a primitive tribal state. In this society the rusting brain cases of long-inert robots are considered trophies, and the scant knowledge that has survived is doled out to an inquisitive few in monasterylike "universities". It is at one such center of learning that young Tom Cushing first reads of the legendary "Place of Going to the Stars".

Exigency

Nine brilliant scientists travel light-years on a one-way trip to an Earthlike planet. Their mission is to study from orbit the two species of intelligent lifeforms on the surface. The first: an isolated people embarking on civilization and building their world's first city. The second: a brutal race of massive predators, spread thick and still growing across the dominant landmass - destined to breed and eat their way to extinction within a few centuries.

Iron Mike

They came, but not in peace. They came to destroy us. Our cities crumbled. Our people died by the billions. Their weapons were sophisticated beyond our worst nightmare. In this chaos, a teenage boy must get his sister to safety and, in doing so, become a man.

City

Jenkins was a robot. He was built to be the perfect worker, tireless and uncomplaining. But, quite unexpectedly, he also became a close companion to generation after generation of his owners as the human race matured, moved beyond the confines of its once tiny planet, and eventually changed beyond all recognition.

Constitution

The year is 2650. Seventy-five years ago, an alien fleet attacked Earth. Without warning. Without mercy. We were not prepared. Hundreds of millions perished. Dozens of cities burned. We nearly lost everything. Then the aliens abruptly left. We rebuilt. We armed ourselves. We swore: never again. But the aliens never came back. Until now. With overwhelming force the aliens have returned, striking deep into our territory, sending Earth into a panic.

Legacy: Fractured Era Legacy, Book 1

Three hundred years ago, Earth suffered a mass extinction event. The last humans fled to the stars in search of a new home. In the darkness, they fought to survive. Now the fleet decays, and their hope of finding a better world is fading. Era Corinth works to preserve the archives, but viewing them herself would be treason. When she's faced with the possibility that her unborn child may be aborted due to a genetic defect, her fascination with ancient secrets escalates to obsession.

15 Minutes: A YA Time Travel Thriller: Rewind Series, Book 1

Fifteen minutes is all the Rewind Agency gives a person when they travel to the past, but for Lara Crane it's enough for her to race through the city, find her mother, and stop her from being killed in a mugging that happened over 10 years ago. But the story she's been told all her life is a lie. When Lara takes a bullet meant for her mother, her future changes forever. A new house, new friends, and a new boyfriend turns Lara's life upside down.

Timescape

In a future wracked by environmental catastrophe and social instability, physicist John Renfrew devises a longshot plan to use tachyons - strange, time-traveling particles - to send a warning to the past. In 1962, Gordon Bernstein, a California researcher, gets Renfrew's message as a strange pattern of interference in an experiment he's conducting.

Future Shock

Elena Martinez has hidden her eidetic memory all her life - or so she thinks. When powerful tech giant, Aether Corporation, selects her for a top-secret project, she can't say no. All she has to do is participate in a trip to the future to bring back data, and she'll be set for life. Elena joins a team of four other teens with special skills, including Adam, a science prodigy with his own reason for being there.

The Socket Greeny Saga: Socket Greeny, Book 1-3

The entire Socket Greeny trilogy (Discovery, Training, and Legend) follows a white-haired teenager that discovers he's part of an evolved human race, how he trains to understand his true self, and the legendary conclusion of his true nature.

Oasis

My name is Theo, and I'm a resident of Oasis, the last habitable area on Earth. It's meant to be a paradise, a place where we are all content. Vulgarity, violence, insanity, and other ills are but a distant memory, and even death no longer plagues us.

Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers.

Invasion: Alien Invasion, Book 1

They are coming. The countdown has begun. First visible only as blips on a telescope image, the discovery of objects approaching from Jupiter's orbit immediately sets humanity on edge. NASA doesn't even bother to deny the alien ships' existence. The popular Astral space app (broadcasting from the far side of the moon and accessible by anyone with Internet) has already shown the populace what is coming.

Serengeti

It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti - a Valkyrie class warship with a sentient AI brain - on her own, wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space. On the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside.

Hardwired

Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals.

Sixth Cycle

Captain Jake Phillips wakes in his crash-landed craft and finds Earth transformed into a frightening new world. He faces two immediate threats that will test his survival skills to the limit. Mutated beings prowl the landscape, hunting humans and searching for the remaining resources. Without a plan in place, the battle will be lost, and humanity as Jake knows it will be destroyed. Sixth Cycle is a gritty post-apocalyptic story of survival and adventure.

More Than Human

In this genre-bending novel, among the first to have launched sci fi into literature, a group of remarkable social outcasts band together for survival and discover that their combined powers render them superhuman. Together, they may represent the next step in evolution - or the final chapter in the history of the human race. As they struggle to find whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging.

Nightwings

For 1,000 years, mankind has lived under the threat of invasion from an alien race. After the oceans rose and the continents were reshaped, people divided into guilds - Musicians, Scribes, Merchants, Clowns, and more. The Watchers wander the Earth, scouring the skies for signs of enemies from the stars. But during one Watcher's journey to the ancient city of Roum with his companion, a Flier named Avluela, a moment of distraction allows the invaders to advance. When the Watcher finally sounds the alarm, it's too late: the star people are poised to conquer all.

Publisher's Summary

Richard Dawkins Recommends this science-fiction classic in which a race of survivors lives underground, as far from the Original World as possible and protected from the ultimate evil, Radiation. Then terrible monsters, who bring with them a screaming silence, are seen and people start to disappear. One young man realizes he must put everything he knows behind him, and question the nature of Darkness itself.

BONUS AUDIO: In an exclusive introduction, evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins explains why, "of all the novels I have ever read, this is, perhaps, the one that I find myself describing to others more often than any other".

I like Jack Reacher style characters regardless of setting. Put them in outer space, in modern America, in a military setting, on an alien planet... no worries. Book has non moralistic vigilante-justice? Sign me up!
(oh, I read urban fantasy, soft and hard sci-fi, trashy vampire and zombie novels too)

Not only is this a very well imagined world where nobody can see - it is a world where humans have lost any understanding of sight; even the verb "to see" is lost to language.

While the premise might be a bit on the edge of believability (how many generations, really, would it take for humans to forget they ever could see?), the author is very consistent - there are no "slip ups" in referencing any aspect of sight.

The book has a philosophical look at light versus darkness (in both a literal sense and in a spiritual one) and this is also quite well-done: it doesn't feel at all patronizing or moralizing.

The story is perhaps a bit "dry" and involves a lot of rushing around, and the interpersonal relationships seem a bit contrived, but is very interesting in the different perspective it provides, more than for its storyline.

The narration is very good. (I skipped the ~7 minute introduction by Dawkins, however, because it was rather boring and not very well spoken.)

Although written in the 60s this book has a plausible branch of truth to it. The book was not the usual dribble of easily guessable plot twists and held my attention for the most part. I rate it 4 for the content and a 3 for ease of reading (I was bored on occasion).

I wouldn't have even finished this book if it weren't for Richard Dawkins' recommendation. It's from 1961 and reads like one of those pulp sci-fi novels of that era where the writer thinks up a good gimmick (in this case, a world without light) and then inhabits it with cardboard characters, slight sense of place and regular action that has no tension. Gimmicky, that's the word that comes to mind - with silly uses of language that hammer us over the head - people curse with the word "Radiation!" and whenever one of us might shout "Oh God!", the characters instead say "Oh Light!" There are so many interesting things that could've been done with the mechanics of a world without light but the author doesn't even explain how they get their vitamin D and what the livestock live on. No one ever goes to the bathroom in the entire book -- yet they live in enclosed caves where the stench from open pit latrines would be overwhelming. Even the novel's, last sentence is weak. The concept that so intrigued Dawkins is not fleshed out and could've been better told in a short story. The previous reviewer said he was bored at times but gave it four stars. I was bored most of the time, except at the end when (not a spoiler) there's discussion of how people adjust to encountering light. One star.

What does Eric Michael Summerer and Richard Dawkins (Introduction) bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Beware that the introduction from Richard Dawkins contains spoiler. I recommend to skip the introduction and go to the book. And then listen to the introduction after listening to the whole book. This introduction would better be a post-script.

Any additional comments?

I understand that people sometimes behave extremely unpredictably and illogically, but in my opinion the main character's behavior later in the book is quite exaggerated. However it is very difficult to predict what fears and psychological roadblock may prevail in person's had in such extreme situation. Otherwise the story is excellent.

I believe Dawkins recommended this book so highly because it is a thought-provoking book with a good storyline. Don't look at this book at a simplistic level - it has more interesting concepts that the 'post-apocalyptic what if...?' of surviving underground darkness and the resultant finely attuned hearing. If you are looking for a simple sci-fi read, this book will seem heavy-handed and boring but at a deeper level it contains elements of Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave', inevitable parallels with religion and plays with interesting ideas of perception. That is why this book was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1962 and only lost out to Robert Heinlein?s "Stranger in A Strange Land", a book repeatedly appearing in Top-10 lists of "Best Sci-Fi Books Ever". This book is well read and at six-and-a-half hours long is concise and entertaining. A highly recommended forgotten classic.

4 of 5 people found this review helpful

Neil

9/5/09

Overall

"Worth a listen"

Interesting book plot well narrated. DO NOT LISTEN to the SPOILER INVESTED introduction though. The book's strength is in having a picture of the world slowly revealed. The introduction contains multiple SPOILERS & should be removed in my opinion.

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

Allan

LondonUnited Kingdom

6/2/09

Overall

"Heavy-handed"

I enjoyed Dawkins' introduction, and he summarised the book nicely.

The book itself is very heavy-handed, plodding, obvious and boring. There is no light touch here; it's all "Light take you!", and "I wonder if I'll ever be able to figure out the mystical relationship between light, darkness and the eyes" all the way through.

It could have been an interesting short story, but the way it is written I despair at how Dawkins can recommend it so highly. Even the plot device, where humans have lost their sense of sight from dwelling underground is thin I think; how about the light that wil invariably be generated from the incessant striking of stones against metal? No, it'd pitch darkness here, in every sense possible.

As an avid reader of all kinds of fiction, including SciFi, I am more than prepared to suspend my disbelief a bit, but this is just not well written enough to bother.

Avoid. If I could resell a copy, I'd sell you mine, cheaply.

6 of 10 people found this review helpful

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